PBS' "America's Stone Age Explorers" looks at pre-Clovis evidence

When a mainstream resource like PBS seriously deals with the controversial hypothesis regarding pre-Clovis settlement in the Americas, then you know that we must be on the verge of the disintegration of the Clovis paradigm.

Clovis is a theory that the earliest North Americans were those primitive peoples who walked across the land bridge that once existed between Siberia and Alaska. This land bridge was submerged by the melting of the ice from the Ice Age.

The name is taken from the site of the first discovery of a cache of these classic stone points at Clovis, New Mexico in 1933, along with the skeleton of a mammoth. Since then, the Clovis points have been found in 48 states, plus Mexico, Belize, and Costa Rica.

The Clovis theory of settlement of North America sets a time frame of 10,500 to 12,000 years ago. But the combination of archaeological digs and DNA evidence pushes the timeline further back. MUCH further back.

Researchers have gathered mtDNA samples from an early site near Santiago, Chile called Monte Verde; mtDNA is the relatively unchanged package of genetic material handed down through the female line. There are four main lines of genetic material, labeled A thru D. (This Monte Verde site is a peat bog first discovered in 1976 and authenticated in 1997, which yielded evidence of human habitation going back 14,500 years ago.)

But when scientists went about dating how far back these lines predate modern genetic material, they were shocked to find that three of them date to 20,000 years before the present.

[when they] calculated how long ago the Asian and Native American DNA diverged, he was shocked. He repeated his work, as did other labs. The results were consistent. Three of the four main ancestral groups A, C and D, diverged from their Asian forbears at least 20,000 years ago. And even more striking, the first Americans didn't all come at once, but in at least three waves of migration.

This was a shocking finding. Furthermore, examination of the modern Ojibwa samples showed about 25% of the genetic material was of an unknown origin, called X. At first researchers assumed that this European-like DNA must have come from settlers during the last 500 years -- but closer examination dated it to around 15,000 years ago. If the earliest North Americans came here far earlier than the Clovis theory had supposed, then did they use the land bridge at all?

An even more puzzling question was where was the ancestor of the stone points that defined this people? So far, no evidence of a Clovis-like point had ever been found in Asia or Siberia. But a colleague of Dennis Stanford, named Bruce Bradley, recalled seeing similar points in books about the Solutreans. The Solutreans were an Ice Age people who lived in southeastern France and Spain.

DENNIS STANFORD: I was going through the old arguments: Yeah, well, Solutreans... 5,000 years older than Clovis. And - You've got the Atlantic Ocean out there. So I wasn't convinced that we really ought to push forward on it.
BRUCE BRADLEY (University of Exeter): I remember it a little bit differently. You said, Are you out of your mind?

The time gap was a problem, but one that could be filled by some intermediate evidence dating to an intermediate era. And amazingly enough, scouring American sites produced one that fit the bill: Cactus Hill, in Virginia.

The Solutrean's culture ended in Europe around 18,000 years ago, and the Clovis point would not arrive in America for another 5,000 years. If the Solutreans brought the Clovis point to America, where had they been?
Stanford and Bradley … scoured Clovis sites across the continent, places where other archaeologists had been digging for years. Then, from a site called Cactus Hill, in Virginia, a possibility, a point that resembled the Solutrean style, and it dated far earlier than the Clovis.
DENNIS STANFORD: Here we have a projectile point from a feature that dates right at 15,900 years or 16,000 years ago, which is clearly right in the middle between Clovis and Solutrean. And what's really exciting about it is that the technology here is very similar to Solutrean. In fact it's closer to Solutrean than Clovis where you can see that it's in a progression between Solutrean and Clovis…

A third problem was how else could these ancient peoples move other than by walking? Could they negotiate a water route? The traditional Alaskans keep alive a boat-making tradition using animal skins, and blubber to oil the hides. Dennis Stanford flew to Barrow, Alaska to visit native Inupiat tribes people making their boats.

NARRATOR: Even with warm clothing and food, could the Solutreans have made boats capable of crossing thousands of miles of treacherous, icy water? Today, traditional Inupiat build umiaks, whaling boats, using sealskin and caribou sinew stretched on wood frames and waterproofed with oil applied directly from seal blubber. These same techniques and materials would have been available to prehistoric people. DENNIS STANFORD: Boats like these can...could have made the journey that we're hypothesizing for Solutrean people quite well. In fact, I was noticing on the distance signs here in the middle of town, they say it's about 1,500 miles to Greenland. And we know that, prehistorically, Eskimo peoples moved that distance from here to there several times.

It seems incredible, but native Americans have more varied genetic roots and came to North America far earlier than anyone had previously believed. Sites like Clovis, NM, Cactus Hill, VA, and Monte Verde, plus Meadowcroft (near Pittsburgh, PA), have offered up more evidence than can be ignored any longer. The Clovis theory is on its deathbed and its grave is being readied.

Americas Stone Age Explorers, PBS, air date Nov. 9, 2004, Dillehay, T.D., Ramirez, C., Pino, M., Collins, M.B., Rossen, J., Pino-Navarro, J.D. (2008).

Monte Verde: Seaweed, Food, Medicine, and the Peopling of South America. Science, 320(5877), 784-786.
Earliest known archaeological evidence of Americans found in Monte Verde Chile, Anthropology.net, anthropology.net/2008/05/08/earliest-known-archaeological-evidence-of-americans-found-in-monte-verde-chile/

Cactus Hill, VA site: Roots-Deep Ones - The perils of looking into American prehistory - Cactus Hill excavation in Virginia reveals evidence of early European settlement of the New World, in National Review, June 2001, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_12_53/ai_75333117

Clovis, NM site: The Clovis First/Pre-Clovis Problem, by Tony Baker, Nov. 1997, http://www.ele.net/art_folsom/preclvis.htm on ele.net.

Meadowcroft, PA site: Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, MNSU.edu, http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/meadowcroft.html

Monte Verde, Chile site: Chilean Field Yields New Clues to Peopling of Americas, New York Times, Aug. 25, 1998, http://www.unl.edu/rhames/monte_verde/monte_verde1.htm, Also: Monte Verde Excavation: or Clovis Police Beat a Retreat, UNL.edu at http://www.unl.edu/rhames/monte_verde/MonteVerde.htm

Back To Top